Save Yourself
by arcalumis
Summary: "I cannot save you. I can't even save myself." When Hermione becomes the target of an unknown attacker who insists on wearing the faces of her friends, an unfriendly face may be the only one she can look to for help. Dramione.
1. Prologue: Trouble

**A/N: ****The prologue is intentionally written as an attempt to mirror**** JK's style and the style of the openings of the early novels, which is quite different from my own personal style and the style I imagine readers generally expect to see when starting a new fanfic. ****But bear with me, it's all part of the plan.**

**This fic is my endeavor to write **— **within the limits of my capabilities **—** the most plausible, definitive case for the Dramione ship. ****I've read a ton of great Dramione fanfic over the years **_(looking at you lovesbitca8)_**, but I really wanted to see something that was very strictly canon-compliant. Since I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for, I figured that was a sign that I should take up the mantle. It's your job to write the stories you want to read.**

**That means there will be no prior relationship or attraction between Draco and ****Hermione — just as there is not one shown between them in the books. This also means the maturity of the content will only be slightly more explicit than what is shown in the novels, though I could be persuaded to include a side-story or two with more, ahem, adult content if it feels right.**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

**SAVE YOURSELF  
****Prologue: Trouble**

* * *

Harry Potter was a most unusual young man and not for the reasons one might expect.

Harry was a wizard; this fact alone made him quite strange. However, in truth, this was one of the most ordinary things about him. Over the last ten years, Harry had come to learn just how many wizards (and witches) there were in the world, and just how old and established the wizarding society actually was. Despite having lived most of his early years as a Muggle (non-wizarding folk), Harry had already learned to take much of the wizarding world for granted and had left behind the Muggle world with great ease.

What made Harry Potter unusual was not his magical heritage, no. Rather, he was unusual because of the great amount of perilous trouble that seemed to follow him wherever he went.

As early as his first birthday, Harry was faced with mortal danger. Harry's parents had been murdered at the hands of a Dark Wizard named Lord Voldemort — a man that Harry had spent the better part of the last decade battling despite being an underage wizard who had only recently become aware of his magical ability.

However, with the help of his two best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, and the guidance of many older wizards, Harry had managed to defeat Voldemort in a fierce battle at his former wizarding academy, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

After this battle (which had aptly come to be known as The Battle of Hogwarts), Harry hoped that his life would settle into a semblance of normalcy and that his most troubled days would be behind him.

Unfortunately for Harry, the last few months had been some of the most difficult and distressing of his life. The struggles he faced now were not so exceptional; he had confronted many dangerous and mysterious circumstances in his quest to defeat Voldemort. However, for the first time in his life, he found that he was facing them completely alone.

Practically all of the wizards and witches who had guided him through his past trials were now gone; so many had perished at the hands of Dark Wizards known as Death Eaters as they tried to protect him and put an end to Voldemort's reign of power. And now his closest friends, Ron and Hermione, who had always been at his side through thick and thin…

Harry tried to put it out of his mind as he made his way to his desk in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Harry worked as an Auror — a highly-trained magical law enforcement officer — and with these resources at his disposal, Harry was certain that very soon he would have a plan of action which would solve all of their problems; he just needed more time and focus to fit all of the puzzle pieces together.

Harry knew that Hermione was also working on her own theories, but he felt it best to leave her to herself for awhile. With all that had happened, he found she was quite easy to cross lately, and he knew she would owl him once she had made any meaningful discoveries. Hermione often preferred to do research alone without interference from others who might slow her down. Thought by many to be the cleverest witch in a generation, Hermione was a far more skilled and efficient researcher than Harry could ever hope to be.

Still, it stung a bit, knowing how long it had been since he had last seen her. Worse, it had also been weeks since he had last seen his best friend Ron Weasley, and his absence from Harry's life was not as simple to explain.

Harry couldn't be sure, but he suspected that Ron blamed Harry for Hermione's recent elusiveness. Harry also suspected that Ron had (correctly) guessed that Harry knew more about Hermione's _problem _than he was letting on.

It was not Harry's intention to keep such things from Ron, but Hermione's secret was not Harry's to share. She had confided in Harry and told him that she would explain everything to Ron in due course. Harry was not comfortable with this arrangement at all, especially because Ron and Hermione were now a couple. However, he had agreed to remain in Hermione's confidence until she was ready, if only because Harry expected that together they would find a quick resolution.

Unfortunately, Harry had quite underestimated the difficulty and severity of this task. Days and weeks had stretched into months and the happy and relatively peaceful life that he and his two best friends had formed in the aftermath of the war had begun to crumble. Every day seemed colorless and even the comfort and happiness he felt at home with his girlfriend Ginny was not nearly enough to ease his horribly troubled mind.

No sooner had Harry placed his folio case inside his desk drawer than a great hawk owl landed on the corner of his desk with a shrill hoot, a small roll of parchment tied to its foot. Harry knew right away this was not Ministry business — the Ministry of Magic and most other public owleries generally used common barn owls and tawny owls for their mail delivery. In fact, Harry had only seen an owl like this maybe once or twice since becoming a wizard.

Harry untied the parchment from the owl's uncooperative foot. At once, the proud bird dramatically swept away, gouging scratches into the wood of his desk as it pushed off. Harry had the distinct impression that the bird found him to be personally intolerable. However, Harry paid the departing owl little mind; the contents of the small parchment held him in rapt attention.

_You need to visit Granger._

_She's not well._

Alarmed, Harry turned over the letter, hoping to find the name of the sender, but there was nothing. Just two simple sentences scratched out in neat but unremarkable scrawl, the second line written near the bottom of the small scrap, as though it had been included as an afterthought.

He read the letter again, closing his mind to the chatter of the other Aurors and the whizzing sounds of flying purple memos, searching for a deeper meaning behind the vague message.

_Who else knows?_

The people who were aware of Hermione's _problem_ numbered very few and practically all of them were in this very room. So why would any of them send him an owl?

Harry's heart jumped a little as he considered his options.

Maybe it was just a concerned soul who felt something was amiss and wanted to raise the flag. Someone like Tom at the Leaky Cauldron.

'That must be it!,_' _Harry thought, feeling a powerful rush of relief. He knew Hermione had been staying there for quite some time. Surely Tom or some other lodger simply found her reclusive, testy demeanor worrisome. However, no sooner had this assured theory come afloat than doubt began to scuttle it.

_If it was Tom or someone else, why didn't they sign the letter? And what about that owl? It was an unusual breed. Not exactly a white peacock, but_—

Harry's heart jumped again. His breath caught.

_Granger._

Harry tapped one finger on his desk, his thoughts slow and deep. A tiny, involuntarily noise hummed in his throat. He bit his lip, not sure he could wrap his head around what might be the obvious truth.

He slowly folded the letter and slipped it into the pocket against his chest, feeling for a moment the quickened pace of his own heartbeat.

_It said 'Granger.'_

This was definitely a sign of trouble.


	2. Chapter 1: Déjà Vu

**SAVE YOURSELF  
****Chapter 1: Déjà Vu**

* * *

Hermione was certainly familiar with the existence of prescient visions and prophetic dreams, both theoretically (from books) and practically (though only second-hand).

They were not as someone like Professor Trelawney would have described them — as wholly metaphysical, an extension of the great Inner Eye. The instances of mystical foresight that Hermione had witnessed appeared to be seeded in something far more...elemental.

In Harry's case, it was not mere chance that he was gifted with these abilities. In fact, more often than not, they presented themselves as something like an afterimage of past misfortunes, accompanied by pain and doubt, not clarity or power. And, of course, one could not forget the prophecy that had canonized him and the preternatural connection to Voldemort that he possessed as a result.

All of which is to say that Hermione Jean Granger, a stalwart skeptic on the subject of divination and the abilities of those who claimed clairvoyance, was not especially disposed to consider that perhaps she herself may have been the recipient of a prophetic vision.

After all, she was not Harry Potter. No prophecies had ever been made about her (as far as she was aware, though there happened to be a curiously large number of unexplored orbs hidden away in the Department of Mysteries). Any dreams or sense of déjà vu that Hermione ever experienced were attributed strictly to illusions of the subconscious mind, and any alignment they may have had with events taking place in the natural world only served as confirmation that they were rooted firmly in the quotidian, not magical or transcendental phenomenon. For what greater universal purpose would be served by dreaming about being buried under a pile of borrowed library books except to remind the dreamer to return them on time?

Therefore, the dream she woke from breathlessly, tearfully, with a hand clamped over her mouth on the morning of her twenty-first birthday was viewed as nothing more than a regrettable happenstance — a byproduct of some internalized anxiety about growing older, or about leaving the past behind, or some other unease of a similar kind.

She certainly didn't have time to fret about such things in her waking hours — not with a full-time job at a Ministry that was still recovering from years of political turmoil, extracurricular time spent advancing S.P.E.W., and a boyfriend with an unusually healthy appetite to attend to. And she'd also recently volunteered to re-catalogue the Hogwarts library on spare weekends in anticipation of its full reopening next fall. It only stood to reason that in lacking time for personal rumination during the day, her mind would resort to an alternate means of transmission.

Hermione cursed herself for being so bloody thick, for not learning her lesson from the Time-Turner crack-up in her third year at Hogwarts. Clearly, she was now neglecting herself to the point of forcing her own brain to resort to subterranean mental trickery, the kind that lifted and shifted the cobblestones of the neatly laid course that she ritually abided day-in and day-out.

She'd been thinking about the dream all day, tripping over it whenever her focus was most demanded: when she should have been drafting her latest report about the increased demand for knarl quills and the protective measures needed to maintain the wild knarl population; when reviewing notes from the informal interview she had conducted with Winky last spring (whose condition had improved considerably through the years); over dinner as Ron complained about the case that he and Harry had caught today, something to do with a group of profoundly stupid teenagers who'd started a secret society at an Unplottable location to collect and trade Dark Artifacts.

Only after Ron had slipped away into unconsciousness, his back facing her as she stared up at the bedroom ceiling of her small but cozy Muggle flat, was she able to recount the dream from beginning to end.

_She was floating…...supine, hands resting on her stomach, in a long white cotton nightdress. Her back was flat, face deeply passive as though enchanted into a deathlike slumber like a fairytale princess._

_She was drifting over the Black Lake at Hogwarts, the harvest moon painting light across the water's jewel-dark surface in a long shimmering stroke, all the way to the shoreline. She followed the lighted path, her pale face and bare shoulders seeming to pull toward the lambent moonlight, her soul warmed by its golden cast. Creatures deep in the Forbidden Forest howled with urges she could not understand and the wind whistled, chilly and uninviting, rustling her slip and catching her untamed hair._

_Soon, she was entering the castle, familiar figures coming into view. The first was Luna Lovegood, sitting under an arch in the front cloisters, knees pulled up, back against the column, a copy of _The Quibbler _open in her lap._

"_Strange, though not unexpected, " Luna said softly, not looking up._

_The front doors creaked open then, and Hermione saw herself pulled in, toes and ankles pointing ahead. Other faces began to emerge._

_Professor Flitwick and Professor Sprout conversing over a jar of twinkling herbs. Mad-Eye Moody poking Hagrid in the back with his walking stick, leaning in to whisper something conspiratorial as Hagrid stooped to his level. A small pride of Gryffindors including Dean Thomas, Seamus Finnigan, and Lee Jordan hot on the heels of Fred and George Weasley, large grins splitting their faces, clearly on their way to stir up some mischief._

_She floated past the open doors of the Great Hall, a large mixed group of Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws had joined together in what appeared to be an Exploding Snap tournament. Cho Chang seemed to be taking Cedric Diggory to task while Hannah Abbott was getting the best of Michael Corner as Terry Boot and Susan Bones watched eagerly. High up at the teacher's table, Professor Dumbledore sat, attentive yet relaxed, on his stately Headmaster's chair, both listening with his left ear to the adamant concerns of Professor McGonagall while keeping a close eye on the developments of the card game below._

_She floated upward, toward the stairs, finding Lupin and Tonks on the first landing. Lupin was holding up a young Teddy as Nymphadora directed his attention to something exciting out the window, all three of them with wide eyes and parted mouths, happy together. Hermione watched a glittering tear slip down her temple from her own closed eye._

_As she continued, she encountered the usual quiver of Slytherins — Crabbe, Goyle, Zabini, Parkinson — all huddled together, unspeaking, eyes haunted._

_Parvati Patil and Lavender Brown rushed up to Professor Trelawney, who was wrapped securely in her endless beaded shawls, and gushed sycophantically to her about some silly something-or-other they'd viewed in their crystal balls._

_Around the bend, Arthur and Ginny were having a lively conversation about the Holyhead Harpies lineup, Arthur's arm slung lovingly over Ginny's shoulders, while Molly smiled proudly and Neville listened in, a half-step removed. He watched Hermione curiously as she drifted past, lifting his hand in a small wave._

_Further still, Professor Snape lurked in a darkened doorway, arms crossed, tsk-ing as she went by._

_And finally, she came upon Harry and Ron sitting on a long wooden bench, listening in amazement as Sirius recalled a wild misadventure of the Marauders from his misspent youth. They laughed together with genuine happiness, relaxed and innocent, the kind that no one, not even the dementors or Voldemort can ever take away from you. _

_Then she was alone, drifting for an eternity down a long empty corridor, the voices of all of her friends and loved ones far behind. The corridor began to shift into darkness. All paintings and doors disappeared. The floor curved down into oblivion._

_She felt her body come to a halt, suspended in nothing but soft, silvery blackness. A deep loneliness began to creep in, pushing, expanding, cascading across the invisible nothingness._

_Somewhere near, a figure materialized from the dark and began a slow, fearful march to her side, banishing the loneliness with each step. The figure lifted her hands, just enough to slip a midnight blue envelope beneath them, which she cradled against her belly._

_She spoke, eyes still pressed closed. "When will I see you again?"_

"_I don't know."_

_A rush of warmth flooded her body as she felt a soft kiss pressed to her forehead._

_She felt herself becoming smaller and smaller and smaller as the surrounding universe grew bigger and bigger and bigger until nothing at all seemed to matter much anymore._

_Then, all gone…_

When she woke, a feeling of incurable dread was waiting to greet her. She felt as though she had lived a whole life in the space of that dream, and she'd never be able to revisit it or explain it to anyone.

Now, lying in bed, having spent the whole day with a feeling of unreality hovering behind all of her usual commitments and interactions, she was faced with nothing but awful choices.

_Sleep_ and subject herself to the possibility of another disruptive vision.

_Sleep _and give herself back to normalcy; allow the construct to collapse, the details and the emotions swept away with a night of dreamless sleep.

_Don't sleep_ and compound her feelings of helplessness and otherness.

She knew _sleep_ was only inevitable, and therefore _sleep _was the only sensible thing to do.

But she mourned a little at the thought that whatever this was, _this feeling_, this sense of something terrible and sublime that had so clearly come from inside herself (because she could not entertain that it had come from anywhere else) would disappear back into the self-shuffling deck of thoughts and memories and ideas and illusions and hopes that lived deep inside, lost to her until the most inopportune moment, when it would surely emerge again...just in time to explode in her hand.

* * *

"Oh, I'm rubbish at this."

"I'm sure it's fine. It's only a progress report. Just do it quickly and move on."

Hermione was quite out of patience already this week, and it was only Wednesday afternoon. She had never really minded being needed. Quite the opposite, in fact. It was good to feel useful, and she had never resented how often it seemed her services were required. Knowledge was power and with power one assumes accountability, responsibility. Hermione Granger was nothing if not responsible.

But this week she was beginning to feel a deep pinch of frustration. She had always attached a great deal of self-worth to her ability to be relentlessly productive, to being efficient where others were undisciplined, to valuing attentiveness over a carefree existence. Heretofore nothing else about herself — certainly not her looks or her congeniality — had yielded greater personal satisfaction nor produced such glittering jewels of inner pride than her fastidious magical abilities and their successful application to real-world problems.

But slowly, surely, much to her foolish dismay, the shine was wearing off...

Lately, there seemed to be an unstoppable treadmill moving under her feet and she desperately wanted to get off but had no idea how or when or if such a thing were even possible. In spite of her more upstanding self, she found her mind wandering as she idly tapped her quill on her desk, contemplating the appeal of forbidden and socially abhorred spells that could freeze time, even just for a few moments…

She was too young, too ambitious to feel so horribly burnt out. She had twenty, thirty, maybe forty years of work ahead of her and already she had sprinted herself into bitter exhaustion.

Or maybe it wasn't that at all.

"_When will I see you again?"_

"_I don't know."_

The specter of the dream passed by again, like a cloud moving over the sun, dragging behind it a cold mist of loneliness and shame. Why should such a thing seem so real to her when her actual life was right here, tugging at her sleeve, begging her to pay attention?

"Hermione, are you okay?"

She looked over to her deskmate, none other than Justin Finch-Fletchley, who had recently completed his sadly interrupted magical education and joined the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures just last month.

Hermione heard that the Reform efforts put forth by Kingsley Shacklebolt immediately following the war had included initiatives to reach out to Muggle-borns who had distanced themselves from the wizarding world and who looked upon the Ministry with a tainted eye following the creation of the Muggle-Born Registration Commission and the subsequent persecution of Muggle-borns. Apparently, not even the arrest and imprisonment of Dolores Umbridge had been enough to regain their trust and pointed efforts had to be made to mollify the suspicious Muggle-born population and cajole them into re-integrating.

One such initiative appeared to be recruiting more Muggle-borns to the Ministry to help bolster confidence and prove that the Ministry was in fact a fairer and non-discriminatory institution under the stewardship of Shacklebolt.

Hermione was certainly happy to see a familiar face in a Department mostly staffed by the old guard. After the war, it seemed that most new Ministry recruits were far more interested in Magical Law Enforcement than any other positions the Ministry had to offer. The war seemed to have profound moral implications on the younger generation of wizards and witches, many of whom seemed to have also gotten a taste for beating back Dark Wizards during the Battle of Hogwarts.

That said, Justin wasn't exactly the type of partner she'd had in mind. She ended up proofing most of his reports before they were turned in, almost as though she was back at Hogwarts correcting Harry and Ron's homework. But at least he was kind and generous, as any good Hufflepuff should be. Also, he'd previously been a member of the D.A., a group that would always have a dear place in her heart. They had a good chuckle when he first arrived, recalling the time he and Ernie Macmillan helped turn Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle into slugs — though their mirth quickly faded upon remembering the unfortunate fate of one Vincent Crabbe, and yet another memory was folded away into her imaginary Hogwarts trunk, along with so many others from her school days — childish, frivolous memories now clouded by the shadow of death.

"I'm fine," Hermione said, answering him at long last. "Just had a funny dream is all. I've been distracted." She shook herself, smiling at how girlish and silly she must have sounded.

"I can tell," he said. "You haven't even opened your mail after lunch."

"What?"

He pointed with his quill to her inbox.

Hermione felt ice slide down her stomach. A thick midnight blue envelope. She was suddenly inclined to whip out her wand and perform every counter-curse she had ever learned.

"I don't think it's going to bite you," he said, his meaning quite literal. Just last week one of the department managers had gotten a nasty bite from a fanged letter mailed by a disgruntled sender. "It's just from the Reform Department."

Of course. She couldn't believe she hadn't realized it before.

The Albus Dumbledore Department of Magical Reform — named in honor of the beloved felled Hogwarts headmaster and colored-coded to match the shade of blue he was most often seen wearing — had been formed shortly after the war, as an independent Department of the Ministry. Kingsley Shacklebolt wisely thought it best to give the Reform Department space to formulate its own legislation while still operating under the auspices of the Ministry, for it was certain to be both a vital and controversial part of wizarding rule for years to come. They even operated out of their own satellite office, separate from the main Ministry building.

But what in Merlin's name could the Reform Department want with her?

She picked up the letter, seeing her name written in twinkling gold ink, turned it over, and removed a single piece of clean parchment.

_Dear Ms. Granger,_

_I hope this letter finds you well._

_I would like to invite you to lunch in my office tomorrow to discuss a matter for which we believe you can provide indispensable insight._

_I have already cleared a two-hour period between 12pm and 2pm with the head of your Department to allow you plenty of time for travel._

_Please reply via owl once you have received this letter to confirm your attendance._

_Best regards,  
Dharma DeLoughrey  
Chair of Educational Reform  
Albus Dumbledore Department of Magical Reform_

Hermione made a face. Seeing the words "education" and "reform" in such close proximity conjured unpleasant images of Dolores Umbridge and her clipboard, waddling condescendingly in her pink Mary Jane pumps.

She banished the thought. Dolores Umbridge had never thought anything Hermione had to say could be indispensable. In fact, Hermione suspected Umbridge would have liked nothing better than to _dispense_ with her at the earliest acceptable opportunity, thorn in the side that Hermione had proved to be.

She folded the letter and slipped it back into the envelope. On any other day, she would have summoned an owl and replied straight away, fearing a tardy response would make a poor first impression. But a very distinct feeling of ambivalence bore down on her. She imagined herself playing a game of hide-and-seek with a faceless opponent. Something funny was going on, and she could not figure it, couldn't flush it out.

She sensed this letter served as some point of bifurcation, and that once she replied she might not be able to alter events that were to follow, might not be able to return to this point in time ever again.

Hermione rolled her eyes, admonishing herself for such silly superstitious sensibilities, cold reason pulling her comfortably back down to earth. How could a simple owl confirming a lunch meeting affect one's life in a way which could not be undone?

With that, she summoned an owl and harshly scribbled a very sensible reply in very no-nonsense scrawl:

_Ms. DeLoughrey_

_It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance, and I'd be happy to assist you with any matter that would serve the aims of the Reform Department._

_I will Apparate to your building promptly at 12pm._

_I look forward to meeting with you._

_Warm regards,  
Hermione Granger  
Junior Associate  
Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures_

She tied the letter to the barn owl with fierce efficiency, earning herself an annoyed cluck from the creature.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said sincerely.

The owl merely blinked at her and swept away, and as she watched it go she could not help but feel as though the world was spinning out of her control in some indetectable way and that, no matter how much she told herself that her recent malaise was merely a novel concoction conceived wholly and absolutely inside the steamy cauldron of her admittedly complicated psyche — the type generally possessed by talented young females — brewed with delicate and volatile ingredients such as an overly-eager work ethic and a secret yearning for adventure and the adrenalized clarity that bloomed in the aftermath of such exhilaration, she could not deny that she lived in a magical world where simple dreams could have very deep roots in very real and very serious machinations which she might be destined to play a part in.

Stranger things _had _happened, after all.

* * *

**A/N: I'm not the biggest mythology wonk, so forgive me if I get anything wrong.**


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